Posted
by
Unknown Lamer
on Wednesday December 05, 2012 @01:02PM
from the blame-rusty dept.

The Maine lobster population is booming, but it turns out that's bad news if you're a little lobster: "'We've got the lobsters feeding back on themselves just because they're so abundant,' said Richard Wahle, a marine sciences professor at the University of Maine, who is supervising the research. 'It's never been observed just out in the open like this,' he said."
Abundance caused by populations of their predators collapsing.

It's a worrisome development and means that overfishing is collapsing the local ecosystem.
It's no joke, and it's happening all over the world, the scenario is converging for a catastrophic decline in fish populations.

There is a good, free market, reason for this. If you live outside Maine, the cost of shipping live lobsters is mostly keeping them alive (water is heavy, temperatures need to be maintained, etc.). If you live in Maine, then the restaurants aren't limited by the price of their food, but by their seating/serving capacity. They can charge their normal price, and still fill all their seats, so why lower the price?

We go to the market and see the fish case always stocked. But the thing to realize, that as species are being fished out, they fill the case with other species. And prices on some species are skyrocketing.

Farming isn't very viable in many cases because they feed the farmed fish wild caught fish and the cages pollute the ecosystem so badly that the wild fish start to die out. Trout and Talpia are the only ones IIRC that are farmed sustainably - definitely not salmon.

And the thing that kills me, the next time you look at the fish case in the super market, bare in mind that at least half of what's in there will be thrown away.

Or we'll develop some technology that makes the food-related cost similar to what it is now. That's another "invisible hand" thing that happens. Before we chicken-little maybe we should consider the availability of phosphorus outside of the obvious sources.